Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a nondestructive testing and evaluation (NDT & E) system.
Description of the Related Art
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is vital in ensuring the structural integrity of critical components utilized in the aerospace, civil and mechanical industries. The development of SHM has a direct impact on public safety, primarily because it is beneficial in identifying early signs of critical failure and is related to reduced downtime and life extension of aging components and structures.
NDT & E systems are often a crucial part of SHM applications. Currently, no single monitoring technique has been capable of performing complete structural evaluation due to several inherent challenges including unpredictable environmental and loading conditions, limitations of the techniques themselves, lack of an adequately dense sensing network, etc.
Structural integrity monitoring systems based on the Digital Image Correlation (DIC) or the Acoustic Emission (AE) methods currently exist, however they are typically implemented independently and they are operated manually when used to assess material and structural integrity.
Consequently, it would be beneficial to provide an integrated approach in which multiple NDT & E techniques are used to develop an effective SHM system.